Let's Please Stop Crediting Ronald Reagan for the Fall of the Berlin Wall

The U.S. president and his famous speech, commemorated yesterday by the Berlin government, surely played a role, but Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms and East German protesters were far more important.

A crane removes a section of the Berlin Wall on November 11, 1989, as West Berliners watch. (AP)

On Wednesday, Berlin
unveiled a plaque in honor of the 25th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's speech demanding
that Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this wall," delivered June 12, 1987. It was
an exquisite, powerful, and truly historic moment worthy of commemoration. But
Reagan's sometimes-overeager boosters are making some bold claims about the
role that both this speech and its deliverer played in the course of world
history, another example of the ways that the politics of today are distorting
our memory of one of the most complicated conflicts of the 20th century.

It's not
surprising that Reagan-boosters are getting a little carried away with his
legacy, but the extent of their adoration is getting a little extreme. John
Heubusch, Executive Director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and
Library, wrote
for Fox News that the states of Eastern Europe "fell to freedom like
dominoes" after Reagan's words "pushed the first one over. One cannot ignore
how his powerful conviction ended the Cold War by firing a verbal salvo, an
oratorical demand to let freedom prevail."

It is certainly
true that the Reagan presidency helped usher along the opening of the inner
German frontier and later the demise of the Soviet Union. After all, his changes
to U.S. foreign policy toward Moscow challenged, among other things, the status quo that assumed the Berlin
Wall's existence as inevitable. And Reagan reasserted the idea that simple coexistence
with the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe was neither desirable nor
acceptable.

But did Reagan's
1987 address have much bearing on the actual fall of wall? That's a newer idea,
one that happens to put Reagan at the center of a wider narrative of
communism's descent in Europe. In fact, not only was Reagan out of office by
the time the wall collapsed in the summer of 1989, but his speech had received
very little coverage in the media, according to Time
and to historian Michael Meyer, who wrote in his history
of 1989's revolutions, "Major U.S. newspapers with correspondents in
Europe, such as the New York Times, carried stories that ran in the back pages."
Reagan also delivered the speech to an audience of about 45,000,
one tenth the crowd estimated to have attended John F. Kennedy's 1963 speech. When
Reagan declared "Tear down this Wall," it's easy for us to forget now, he was the
visibly aged leader of a lame duck administration clouded by scandal and
corruption, Iran-Contra in particular.

Historians still
dispute, and likely will for many years, the extent to which the Soviet Union
collapsed due to pressures from the U.S. or from within. But the Berlin Wall's
fall was a moment when Gorbachev's actions, not Reagan's, played a particularly
prominent role. The revolts Eastern Europe began in large part because of the
Soviet leader's 1985 decision to launch the reforms of glasnost (openness) and perestroika
(restructuring). Gorbachev also reneged on the Brezhnev Doctrine, which had asserted
that problems within any Warsaw Pact nation were considered "a common problem
and concern of all socialist countries" -- in other words, Moscow would
intervene in Soviet bloc countries to keep them in line.

In eliminating
this mandate, Gorbachev created a climate in places like East Germany much
friendlier to revolution. "What we have now is the Sinatra Doctrine," his chief
spokesman, Gennady Gerasimov, told the world on Good Morning America. "He has a song: 'I Did it My Way.'" Gorbachev
also made clear repeatedly that he wished to see the reform of socialism in
Eastern Europe and warned of the consequences of stagnation. Even as hundreds
gathered outside East Berlin's Palast der
Republik shouting "Gorbi, hilf uns"
-- "Gorbi, help us" -- on the 40th anniversary of East Germany in August 1989, East
German leader Erich Honecker proclaimed, "Den
Sozialismus in seinem Lauf hält weder Ochs noch Esel auf," -- "Neither an
ox nor a donkey is able to stop the progress of socialism". But, as Gorbachev put
it around the same time, "Life punishes those who come too late."

Believing they
had Gorbachev's tacit acquiescence, reform movements that sprung up in Eastern
Europe increased pressure on the East German government to open the wall. In
May 1989, Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh led an effort to remove the border
fence between his country and Austria, which encouraged East Germans to flee
through Czechslovakia to Hungary. By September, 60,000 East Germans were camped
out by the border crossing, at which time Németh allowed for the total opening
of the frontier for these refugees.

By the end of
September, East Germany's Honecker had successfully pressured the Czechoslovak
government, then commanded by fellow hardliner Miloš Jakeš, into shutting their
border with Hungary. Hundreds of East Germans, now stuck in a Czechoslovakia, camped
out on the lawn of the West German embassy in Prague. Honecker relented, allowing
these would-be émigrés safe passage to the West in so-called "freedom trains" that
were to be sealed during their passage through East Germany to the West. But, at
Dresden, demonstrators greeted the trains, climbing on top of the carriages and
hurling rocks and insults at the police. Dresdeners, it should be noted, were unlikely
to have seen Reagan's 1987 address unfiltered, since their city was out of
range of Western broadcasting systems.

On October 9,
one month before the wall fell, 100,000 people marched peacefully through
Leipzig. Armed police were on standby to put the protest down, by violence if
necessary, but then-Politburo member Egon Krenz commanded the police to stand
down, Gorbachev's warnings likely on his mind.

These and other
mass demonstrations within East Germany played a far more significant role than
did Reagan's speech in the fall of the wall on November 9, 1989. In the wake of
sustained pressure from the East German people -- including a demonstration 500,000
strong on the Alexanderplatz public square in Berlin on November 4 -- Politburomember Günter Schabowski announced on November 9 the relaxation of visa
restrictions at the border. "We have decided today to implement a regulation
that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Republic to leave the GDR
through any of the border crossings ... immediately, without delay." His
proclamation set off a clamor to get to the wall as large numbers of East
Germans sought to enter the other side, to rejoin Germany and Europe, forcing
the police to open the border crossings for the first time since 1961. The
flags flying that night as people danced on top of the wall were not American,
but German.

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Liam Hoare, a freelance writer specializing in foreign affairs, has written for The Forward and The Jewish Chronicle.